It’s so weird. Even though you know Los Angeles is falling into hellhole territory like San Francisco, for people like our family, it still carries fond memories. Taking Ebola in a couple weekends a year to wander the La Brea tarpits and the grounds around the George Page Museum or taking him to the Gary Larsen Far Side exhibit at their Museum of Natural History (scientists LOVE Larsen). I remember Kcruella and I driving in for the Georgia O’Keeffe exhibit at the LA County museum in the late 80’s. And a ton of us women Marines going to see Ann Miller and Mickey Rooney in Sugar Babies. No, we didn’t get asked to leave.

All kinds of fun times just driving through town and to this day recognizing spots, like when we catch “Pretty Woman” or “To Live and Die in LA” on one of the channels (Wang Chung played the art houses near us before that movie). We do have fond memories of the whole scene. People have always loved LA for a reason.

It was a boss time to live in SoCal.

And what got me thinking of Richard Gere’s suite in “Pretty Woman” – the whole chi-chi hotel, in fact – was reading about this latest bout of institutionalized California insanity.

I did a deep dive in the March ballot initiative that would require LA’s hotels to serve as temporary homeless shelters.
Even more bonkers than I thought.https://t.co/ThArxbnVR4

— Angela McGregor (@angusmcg) October 12, 2023

WHUT

Bonkers doesn’t begin to describe it.

Is the luxury hotel an endangered species? In Los Angeles, hotel operators say it may be if the “Responsible Hotel Ordinance” passes on the March 2024 ballot. The measure would essentially compel hotels with vacancies to house homeless people alongside guests.

Any rational individual’s initial reaction is “Gotta be a joke.” And then you find out, nope. Serious as a heart attack – the heart attack I’m sure hotel owners and operators are having right about now.

In March, voters in the city of Los Angeles will be asked to decide whether to approve the “Responsible Hotel Ordinance,” a measure that would require hotel operators to report to the city, every day, the number of vacant rooms in their property so the city can send homeless people over to the hotels to stay in the rooms that night.

Seriously. That’s on the March 5 ballot.

Imagine the dismay of the people who work in the hotels if they have to manage that situation. Business travelers, tourists and visitors will be side-by-side in the corridors, elevators, lobby and breakfast room with people who have been relocated from a nearby tent encampment to enjoy the same accommodations, paid for by city taxpayers.

It’s not clear exactly where the money will come from, other than your pocket, but the ordinance states that the homeless guests will bring vouchers for payment at a “fair market rate,” and hotels will be prohibited by law from refusing the guests or the vouchers.

If you thought insurance companies were bailing out of California before, wait until they have to cover this.

HOTELS WILL BE PROHIBITED BY LAW FROM REFUSING

Oh, that is PEACHY.

But it turns out the writer of that article is kind of wrong about one point – that the hotel staff will feel “dismay.” I’m not sure why they should, when it’s their own hotel labor union that started the ball rolling on this whole insane idea.

The “Los Angeles Responsible Hotels Ordinance” came before the City Council on August 5, 2022 after the hotel labor union which authored the motion — UNITE HERE Local 11 — gathered enough valid signatures (roughly 120,000) to qualify. The council had two options — either to vote in favor of putting the ordinance on the ballot in an upcoming election, or to adopt it outright. Public commentary on the motion in favor of the ordinance going before the public was robust.

At the hearing hotel owners, operators, and even employees went berserk over the proposed law, but the hotel labor union heads poo-pooed any and all concerns, swatting away every negative as if they were based on class discrimination as opposed to literal fact and reasonable objection.

…Dozens of hotel owners were present at the hearing, applauding the President of the Hotel Association of Los Angeles [HALA], Heather Rozman, when she told the council members, “Our hotel community is here today because their livelihoods, their family-owned businesses, and in some cases their homes, are at stake.” Hotel workers commented that they were simply unprepared and untrained to provide the mental health and addiction services this population required.

A representative from UNITE HERE countered that the hotel owners were simply perpetuating a myth that “every person experiencing homelessness is so sick that they are a danger to the people around them.” According to a recent, widely cited study of California’s unhoused population, 82% of respondents said that they had experienced “a serious mental health issue” — a number more than four times higher than the general population, according to the CDC.

Is this a case of dueling hotel labor unions? If I was those hotel workers belonging to the geniuses brokering this madness, I’d sure as Schlitz want my dues money back STAT, because a union – last I heard – was supposed to represent their members, not the dregs on the street.

How does this work like this?

…If passed, the ordinance would require all hotels and motels within the city limits to house the homeless in rooms that are not rented out for the night. UNITE HERE leadership is lashing out at the television commercial.

“We’re appalled, actually,” said Kurt Petersen, the co-president of Local 11. “They dehumanize people who don’t have homes and they mock them in the video.”

Personally, I don’t find the anti-ordinance commercial offensive at all. In fact, that homeless fellow looks entirely too clean. Like a Central Casting sanitized, generic “homeless man.”

And frankly, this sob story sounds like a crock of street poopoo from the union local co-president. Bet he’s a Teamster or some such. They’re good at that sort of polished hyperbole.

…Petersen says many members of his union are on the verge of landing in homeless shelters because of low hotel wages.

“If Unite Here succeeds in turning all LA hotels into homeless shelters, eventually there will be no hotels – and no hotel workers – left in the city," one critic said. https://t.co/W6GUDnnR1H

— KTBS (@KTBS) October 12, 2023

The hotel union types may be actually putting their members on the streets if initial visitor reaction to the ordinance is any indication of how it will be received. When surveyed about the proposal, overwhelmingly people just said they just…won’t come.

How about them apples?

MORE THAN SEVEN in 10 Americans would be deterred from booking a hotel room in Los Angeles if hotels there are forced to house homeless people next to paying guests, according to a recent poll by American Hotel & Lodging Association. The survey was released as the city of Los Angel considers a proposed ordinance that would require hotels to house homeless individuals alongside paying guests, a change opposed by AHLA and AAHOA.

That general reaction is a pretty solid, “Oh HAY-YULL, NO” from most everyone they talked to on every single point.

The other issue is liability insurance. As raised in the LA Council meeting, it’s already expensive enough. What happens when the hotel lobby and halls become filled with drug-addicts and mentally unstable characters? Someone gets hurt and someone for sure gets the beejeebus sued out of them.

And don’t forget the the workers’ compensation claims for hotel employees who are knifed, punched, schmaybe get a needle through the hand when they try to clean a room – all manner of mishaps are possible.

It’s ugly, but it’s fact.

…Academic Director of the Cornell Center for Innovative Hospitality Labor and Employment Relations Dave Scherwyn, a hospitality industry labor and management expert who hosts an annual industry conference, spoke to The Center Square about significant liability and danger hotels and guests could be exposed to by the proposed policy, and his own reticence about ever hosting a conference in Los Angeles if the measure passes.

“Liability insurance will go up,” Scherwyn said. “Hotels are liable for guest to guest interactions and guest to guest attacks.”

In the interview, Scherwyn noted that individuals injured at a hotel by homeless individuals while out on a work trip would likely not only collect worker’s compensation from their employer, but could also subject the hotel to “tort liability with unlimited punitive damages,” and that in some cases, the business the employee works to could still be liable for what happens to them on their travels to hotels subject to this measure.

“It’s going to be a ton of litigation and a ton of increased costs for businesses,” Scherwyn said.

LA will dry up so fast visitor-wise, they’ll be astonished. The hotel industry will collapse.

One knucklehead council member actually voted to outright adopt this abomination instead of merely putting it on the ballot and as it’s on the ballot, the city is in a great deal of peril, because God knows how they’ll vote. But it took no time at all for the union to get the signatures, so that bodes ill for the future.

…Unite Here 11 easily gathered the 126,000 signatures required to get the measure on the ballot, which also qualified the Los Angeles City Council to be able to adopt the measure immediately as law. Instead of doing so, they unanimously decided to punt the decision to voters.

“Oftentimes, more than not, politicians don’t want to deal with the collateral damage that comes with making a controversial decision, so they send it directly to the public,” California political analyst Charles Chamberlyane said to The Center Square.

Yeah. They are SO not going to want to deal with the “collateral damage” if this passes.

The Hotel California itself will check out for good.